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Visual research methods

Marcus Banks

Marcus Banks is a lecturer in social anthropology at the
University of Oxford. After a doctorate at the University of Cambridge he
trained as a documentary filmmaker on a one-year Royal Anthropological
Institute / Leverhulme Fellowship at the National Film and Television
School, Beaconsfield. He is the author of Organizing Jainism in India and
England (Clarendon, 1992), Ethnicity: anthropological constructions
(Routledge, 1996), and co-editor of the forthcoming Rethinking visual
anthropology (Yale). He currently has ESRC funding for the HADDON Project
to write a catalogue of archival ethnographic film footage (Ref. R000 23
5891).

Visual data have been of concern to the social sciences in two ways: visual
records produced by the investigator, and visual documents produced by
those under study. In recent years, however, this dichotomy between the
observer and the observed has begun to collapse (as it has across the
qualitative social sciences more generally) and a third kind of visual
record or—more accurately—representation has emerged: the collaborative
representation.

Thus visual anthropology and visual sociology proceed
methodologically by making visual representations (studying society by
producing images), by examining pre-existing visual representations
(studying images for information about society), and by collaborating with
social actors in the production of visual representations.

Issues of documentation

Methodologically, the use of photography, film and video
to document areas of social and cultural life would appear to be
straightforward and unproblematic. In the late 19th century (and later)
photography was used by anthropologists and para-anthropologists to record
and document supposed 'racial types' as part of the discipline's project to
provide a scientific study of humankind. Photography was also employed as
a 'visual notebook' by anthropologists to document aspects of material
culture produced by a particular society. After the invention in 1895 of
the portable motion picture camera, film was employed to the same ends.

In recent years anthropologists and others have begun to re-examine the
products of colonial photography, being as interested as much in the ideas
that led to the production of such photographs as in the societies and
cultural forms they supposedly document (see the essays in Edwards 1992,
and Scherer 1990).

The study of early ethnographic film is less well
advanced, largely because the sources are less well-known and less
accessible, but an ESRC-funded project is currently underway at the
University of Oxford to catalogue much of this earlier material (see under
'Electronic Resources' below), and it is hoped that this will stimulate
further research.

Following on from the Victorian taxonomic and
classificatory uses of visual media, photography, film and video have been
used more recently to gather data for various other kinds of formalist
analysis: proxemics (the study of personal spatial behaviour—see the
chapter by Prost in Hockings 1995), choreometrics and kinesics (the study
of body 'style' and communication—see the chapter by Lomax in Hockings
1995) and conversation analysis (see Goodwin 1981). What many of these
recent projects have in common with their Victorian and Edwardian
antecedents is an approach to mechanical visual recording media which tend
to treat them as neutral technologies capable of objectively recording
social behaviour or visible 'givens'. Images are no more 'transparent'
than written accounts and while film, video and photography do stand in an
indexical relationship to that which they represent they are still
representations of reality, not a direct encoding of it. As
representations they are therefore subject to the influences of their
social, cultural and historical contexts of production and consumption.

Issues of representation

Thus the visual sociologist or
anthropologist adopts a dual perspective on visual media. On the one hand
they are concerned with the content of any visual representation—what is
the 'meaning' of this particular design motif on an art object? who is the
person in the photograph? On the other hand, they are concerned with the
context of any visual representation—who produced the art object, and for
whom? why was this photograph taken of this particular person, and then
kept by that particular person?

When studying visual representations
that have been created by others the dual strands of content and context
are fairly easy to investigate in tandem. Most studies in the anthropology
or the sociology of art, for example, proceed along this twin path (see for
example Coote and Shelton 1992; Fyfe and Law 1988).

When, however, the
visual representations are produced by the investigator there is a danger
of the content taking priority over the context. Within documentary film,
the 'direct cinema' movement in the 1960s sought to correct this imbalance
by ensuring that the conditions of filmmaking were revealed to the viewer
(see Barnouw 1974 for a general history of documentary film, the essays in
Rosenthal 1988 for critical perspectives on this history, and Loizos 1993
for a critical perspective on modern ethnographic film). Typically this
involved the deliberate inclusion of the filmmakers' kit in the image
(lights, microphones, etc.) or even the filmmakers themselves. Such ideas
were absorbed into ethnographic film practice, simultaneously with
techniques that were thought to bring the human subjects of the film closer
to the viewer (principally, the use of sub-titles to render speech in
foreign languages more 'neutrally' than an inevitably inflected voice-over
translation). (See also essays in Rollwagon 1988).

With still
photography, more sensitive or reflexive representations are perhaps
slightly harder to accomplish. In many cases, social investigators choose
to create some marriage of text and image, where each provides a commentary
on the other. Doug Harper, a visual sociologist, has accomplished this to
particularly good effect in his work (Harper 1987; see also Berger and Mohr
1975).

It is important to remember, however, that all visual
representations are not only produced but are consumed in a social context,
one which invokes a family resemblance to similar
representations—television and cinema in the case of film and video.
Members of an audience will bring to the screening certain expectations of
narrative form, 'plot' development, 'good' and 'bad' composition, and so
forth, however unconscious or inchoate their understandings. Nor can a
single 'reading' of a film necessarily be presumed. Sociologists such as
Stuart Hall have advocated the notion of 'preferred readings' (Hall 1977),
while an anthropological study of ethnographic films shown to students
refutes the liberal assumption that such films encourage the viewers
empathetically to narrow the gap between self and a radically different
other (Martinez 1990).

Issues of collaboration

Perhaps the least
collaborative project within visual anthropology and visual sociology is
the semi-mythical project of setting up a (possibly concealed) film or
video camera in a village or neighbourhood for no other reason than to
document whatever passes before it. Similar are the projects that involve
leaving a camera running, or using a stills camera, to record a specific
aspect of social behaviour, the agents of which are either unaware of being
recorded or are encouraged to ignore the camera's presence.

It is,
however, a premise of the ethnographic method that the investigator is to
some extent involved in the cultural and social projects of those under
investigation, if only to the extent that asking questions often forces
those questioned to formalise social knowledge or representations that may
have only a semi-propositional status.

As a result, visual
anthropologists and visual sociologists often directly collaborate with
their informants or subjects in the production of visual texts of various
kinds. This may be done for purely documentary purposes; for example,
asking a craftsperson to pause in the process of production at various
stages in order to photograph the process. It may be done for some project
that is of more interest to the investigator than the subjects; for
example, Worth and Adair's extension of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis
concerning language and cognition into the realm of the visual, which
involved giving film cameras to cinematographically illiterate Navajo and
telling them to film what they liked (Worth and Adair 1972). Or, perhaps
most humanistically as well as most interestingly, it may involve working
together on a project that simultaneously provides information for the
investigator while fulfilling a goal for the subjects. Here a wide range
of projects have been accomplished, from encouraging the subjects to
discuss their family photographs (photo elicitation) and learn more about
themselves (Geffroy 1990; see also Collier and Collier 1986), through
helping people to document problematic or contentious areas within their
own lives (van Wezel 1988), to full-blown attempts to empower people
through visual media. A particularly striking example of the last is
provided by the work of the anthropologist Terence Turner with the Kayapo
of Brazil. With the video cameras and editing facilities that Turner
initially provided, the Kayapo have been exchanging messages and political
speeches between villages, documenting their own rituals and dances, and
documenting their protests against the Brazilian state's planned
hydro-electric dam at Altamira (Turner 1992). Many of their productions
have in turn provided material for Turner's more academic analysis. The
term 'indigenous media' is generally employed to cover those aspects of
visual representation over which 'indigenous' people and others have direct
control (such as local television broadcasting), although some have
questioned the 'empowerment' that is supposed to ensue (see Faris 1992; see
also Ginsburg 1991).

Photograph 1

While willed and active collaboration is the goal
of many visual projects it is probably inadvertently present in all
projects. During the course of my own early fieldwork with an urban
religious group in India I found myself taking the majority of my
photographs at communal, ritual events. On one occasion I took a number of
photographs at a feast, organised to celebrate the conclusion of a period
of fasting. In their content, my images display certain features that are
undoubtedly important to my later analysis—the overall context of the
courtyard in which the feast took place, the segregation of men and women,
the seated feasters and the standing feast givers, and a variety of other
spatial features [see Photograph 1; 83K bytes].

Photograph 2

However, after I had taken a few
such photographs, I began to take closer portrait shots of various friends,
including those who had brought me to the feast. This they tolerated for a
while, and then gently began to suggest other people I should photograph.
They were particularly insistent that I took a pre-posed photograph of the
woman who had paid for the feast, ladling a dollop of a rich yoghurt-based
dessert onto the tray of one of the feasters [Photograph 2; 66K bytes]. Looking at
this image alongside my earlier, wide-angle and contextualising images, I
saw how the 'directed' photograph is a collaborative image. It was
composed and framed according to my own (largely unconscious) visual
aesthetic and is part of my own corpus of documentary images of that feast.
But it is also a legitimisation and concretization of social facts as my
friends saw them: the fact that the feast had a social origin in the agency
of one person (the feast donor) as well as by virtue of the religiously and
calendrically prescribed fasting period that preceded it; the fact that the
donor was (unusually) a woman and that in the photograph she is giving to
men; the fact that this was a good feast during which we ate the expensive
and highly-valued yoghurt dessert. I 'knew' these social facts, because I
had been told them on this or other occasions, but by being directed to
capture them on film I was made aware not only of their strength and value
but of the power of photography to legitimise them.

References

Barnouw, Erik (1983) Documentary: a history of the non-fiction film
(revised edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Berger, John and
Jean Mohr (1975) A seventh man: a book of images and words about the
experience of migrant workers in Europe. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Collier, John Jn and Malcolm Collier (1986) Visual anthropology:
photography as a research method. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press.

Edwards, Elizabeth
(1992) (ed.)Anthropology and photography 1860–1920. New Haven: Yale
University Press in association with The Royal Anthropological Institute,
London.

Faris, James C. (1992) 'Anthropological transparency: film,
representation and politics', in Peter Crawford, & David Turton (eds.) Film
as ethnography. Manchester: Manchester University Press in association
with the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology.

Fyfe, Gordon and John
Law (1988) (eds.) Picturing power: visual depiction and social relations.
London: Routledge.

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